== Syntax ==

=== What? ===

- reveal and describe relationships among words
  - on various levels:
    - noun, verb prepositional phrases, clauses
    - dependency relation
  

=== Why? ===

- syntactic units are carriers of meaning
  - e.g. "in the city"
    - meaning of "in", "the" is unclear, or very complicated
    - meaning of "in the city" is simply "where"
  - usable for mining information, question answering


=== How? ===

- prerequisites
  - morphological information (e.g. part of speech, number, gender)
  - lexical semantic information (e.g. "pregnant" goes with women only)
- statistical methods
  - annotated corpus -> inference of rules
  - hard to customize
- rule-based methods
  - hard to develop and maintain the grammar information
  - easy to customize

... to be continued